The Use Of Grammatical Terminology In English Classes: A Qualitative Study Of Teachers' Practice And Cognition

In the view of modern foreign language teaching history, it is explicit that grammatical instruction, namely, the teaching of morphonology and syntax in class, has always been one of the most researched aspects of L2 teaching, whether in both the method-oriented and in the SLA-oriented era. The dominant paradigm of all the researches above is characterized as a "process-product" research. Or rather, researches on grammar teaching in L2 learning have predominantly focused on learning outcomes rather than on the actual processes of formal instruction. Actually, teaching is a "highly cognitive behavior", and teachers have their own knowledge and teaching conceptions. Since 1990s, foreign/second teachers'cognition has attracted the attention of many foreign researchers. In the perspective of teachers'cognition, a lot of grammar teaching researches have come into being. However, there is few in China. This paper is to describe the actual employment of grammatical terminology in English classes of China, and further explore the inner cognitions of grammar teaching, in order to reveal the cognition model of English teachers in China and facilitate grammar teaching and teachers'self-development.The subjects involved in the study are six participant teachers of English in Changsha, Hunan, whose native language is Chinese. Or rather, they are chosen in the following ways:four teachers respectively from Grade seven, eight, ten and eleven of the middle school affiliated to Hunan University and two teachers of first-year and second-year non-English major undergraduates. They are different from each other in age, gender, academic qualifications, and teaching years. The whole procedure of the study is pre-interview, one-unit class observation, post-interview and feedback. Through above process, the author analyzes the cognition factors of use or avoidance of grammatical terminology in English class in China.According to the "start list" designed by Miles and Huberman in 1994, the author first encoded the interview data, namely categorization (The data out of the list would be recategorized). It is concluded that teachers'decisions about the role of grammatical terminology in their work are influenced by an interacting range of experiential, cognitive, and contextual factors. (1) Teachers'beliefs about teaching and learning are influenced by significant educational and professional experiences in their lives. The only point that should be stressed as a result of this study is that L1 and L2 education, teacher education, and ongoing classroom teaching make teachers'cognition highly personalized. (2) Teachers'different cognitions of some teaching beliefs such as the factors influencing English communicative competence, the effective way to learn grammar, students'knowledge of grammatical terminology, students'learning styles and teachers'role in class directly decides whether the teacher actually uses the grammatical terminology or not. (3) The teachers'practices and comments on their work indicate that decisions about the use of terminology are also influenced by some specific instructional contexts, schools'requirement, teaching time and task, textbooks, and testing syllabus. Because the above three aspects exist interactively and even conflict with each other, the teacher cannot use or avoid the grammatical terminology in a certain way.This study discusses the cognition of English teachers in China from the actual classroom usage of grammatical terminology. It is hoped that this paper would shed some lights on the grammatical teaching and research of foreign languages, foreign language teachers'education and their professional development, English teaching environment in China and other issues. However, due to the complication of teachers' cognition, this study is only a preliminary exploration and research. The study only uses six English teachers from two schools in Hunan as samples; therefore, the results may not be comprehensive. As a result, the paper proposes some suggestions in the end for further study so as to explore a set of models for our foreign language teachers' education and development, and promote the reform of foreign language teaching.